Customer journey management may involve customer journey mapping. Customer journey mapping can include the process of assembling all interactions a customer has with a company or other third party into one time-line. Examples of interactions include but are not limited to, each page view on a company website, telephone conversations and responses to an interactive voice response “IVR” system. A customer journey may be represented in a computing system as a set of logged events, and each event may correspond to an interaction.
Customers may interact with companies over one or more channels such as telephone, email, web browsing and others. Consequently, customer journeys may span one or more channels.
Customers may be identified by different identifiers at different times, according to the channel they are using (e.g. by a telephone number in a call center channel or an anonymous cookie in a web channel). Complete customer journeys may be built up by joining up data across many channels. Once this is done, various analyses are possible that frequently fall under the broad label of customer journey mapping.
Today companies can embark on customer journey mapping as they typically believe that information derived from this exercise can help their businesses in various ways such as:                Fixing and improving processes        Reducing customer effort and improving customer experience (CX)        Preventing customer defection and churn        Reducing the level of complaints        Increasing the level of up-selling and cross-selling opportunities        Differentiating their business based on customer experience        
However, there are typically difficulties centered on how the assembled customer journeys are used to achieve the above goals. To achieve any of these it is desirable to know, for example at one or more key stages during their journey, what the customer is trying to do and why. However, customer journey mapping may only provide a historical trail of where customers have been and what actions they have performed. If it can be inferred from this information what customers are trying to do and how successfully they are in doing it, it is possible to proactively intervene in the journey when necessary to improve the customer experience.
The use of information, such as that provided by customer journey mapping, to intervene in a customer journey or otherwise improve a customer journey for example by redesign of a web site or IVR system may be termed customer journey management.
Today, most companies take one of several approaches to the use of customer journey mapping information for customer journey management. Each of these gives a limited view of the customer's real intent. Examples of such approaches include:                Only using “attitudinal” sometimes called “intent based” survey results—in this approach at some critical point in a customer journey (e.g. immediately after finishing a call center call) a survey question or questionnaire is sent to the customer, for example using a text message, asking what their experience was like or how completely they achieved their objective.                    The problem here is that surveys are usually sent to only a small subset of customers. If customers were asked questions after every interaction some would soon become frustrated and the effect would be to worsen the customer experience.                        Only using behavioral events—these may comprise raw interaction data, for example relating to page view events on the web, products purchased, call center logs, etc.                    This approach confines itself to the facts and makes no attempt to reveal customer attitude or intent directly. Human interpretation of patterns in the data is generally required to infer attitude and then again human intervention to make the required changes to address the above goals.                        Using heuristics based on business assumptions, for example “if a customer wants to do X then they will visit page A, then call the call center”. The ease with which they perform a certain sequence of actions is assumed to correlate with customer satisfaction. A customer trying the same sequence several times may be assumed to be having trouble and possibly require assistance. The usefulness of this approach is limited by the accuracy of the heuristics and provides no information about how these heuristics are created in the first place. Furthermore, as these heuristics are typically likely to be things a human can easily remember and articulate they are likely to be relatively simple and address only a small number of ideal interaction paths. Real interaction paths are, generally, a lot more complex.        
The results of efforts to drive proactive action using known approaches are frequently inaccurate and sometimes counterproductive. By using small sample sizes, not taking a joined up approach across the full customer journey, and not taking into account the impact that the sum of all customer interactions can have in the customer experience, most approaches are limited in the benefit they can deliver.